How to Restore Images When Memory Card Renders ‘Read Only File System’ Error in Mac

Devices like digital cameras and camcorders use memory cards as default data storage device. When you click a photo or capture a video with your camera or camcorder, it directly gets stored in its memory card. Moreover, you can transfer the image and video files stored in the memory card to your Mac as well by attaching these devices to your machine. Despite these alluring features of memory cards, many times you encounter a situation wherein you become completely unable to access anything stored on it. This situation causes severe data loss and generates the need of Mac photo recovery software.

Let us take a practical example to understand such situations. To transfer some of the recently clicked image files from your camera to your machine, when you attach the camera card to your Mac and open the containing folder, encounter the following error message:

“Volume is read only”

This error is followed by complete inaccessibility of all the image files stored on your camera card. In order to rectify this problem with the ‘Disk Utility’ when you open it, find that its ‘Restore’ button is disabled. Therefore, in such situation to rectify the problem you need to use the following command:

“sudo chown -R USERNAME /Volumes/….”

However, this command too fails to do any needful for you as you get the following error message:

“chown: /volumes/Untitled/IMG_0011.jpg: Read-only file system”

This error message causes complete inaccessibility of all the image files stored in the memory card of your camera or camcorder. In such cases, when everything else becomes unable to do any needful for you, then use of a professional Mac photo recovery software is recommended. Professional Mac data recovery tool recovers lost, deleted, or inaccessible files from memory cards and other data storage devices like internal or external hard drive of your machine.

Most of these tools support almost all kinds of memory cards including SD, SDHC, etc. Generally all tools of this category have simple intuitive user interface and simple steps for performing the recovery of your precious image files lost due to inaccessibility.

However, there can be a case when you find out that your memory card has become completely inaccessible that means it became unrecognized by your Mac. In such cases formatting of the card becomes the only resolution to overcome the loss. However, you need not to worry about the files that are lost due to formatting as an efficient Mac photo recovery tool performs the recovery of your photos even after formatting.

In case of formatting you have to be careful as if you keep on using your affected memory card even after format, then you may lose your photos forever. This is because using the memory card after the loss overwrites the deleted images and thus causes loss forever as no data recovery tool can recover the overwritten images. Therefore, it is said to use professional Mac photo recovery software and keep your memory card unused until the recovery software performs its job.

Most of these tools are available separately for Mac and Windows users both, thus you can select the one according to your Operating System.